The self-driving vehicle industry may be young, just a bit over a decade old, but already a meaningful trend is taking shape: it's proving to be more open to women CEOs and founders–including women of color–than the broader tech industry and for U.S. companies generally. With this week's news that Waabi founder and CEO Raquel Urtasun raised $83.5 million in a Series A round for her Toronto-based startup, three out of 12 leading autonomous technology companies in North America are now led by women. What's more, in a time when companies across all industries are working to improve diversity, two of the women leading self-driving tech companies, Zoox CEO Aicha Evans and Waymo co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana, are Black. "I've been really excited to see the number of women interested in autonomous technology. There's an appreciation for what it can do for people, what it's going to unlock," says Alisyn Malek, who left General Motors to cofound autonomous shuttle startup May Mobility in 2017 (and is currently executive director of the Washington-based Commission on the Future of Mobility).

Waabi is a new autonomous vehicle startup with a few things going for it to help it rise above the fray. For one, it's founded by Raquel Urtasun, a renowned expert in computer vision who ran Uber Advanced Technology Group's Toronto outpost, making it one of the few women-led AV startups in the world. Second, the Toronto-based company just came out of stealth having raised $83.5 million, which is among the largest Series A rounds ever raised in Canada. The round was led by Khosla Ventures, with additional participation from Urtasun's former employer, Uber, and Aurora, the AV startup that ended up acquiring Uber ATG in a deal last year. Funding was also raised from 8VC, Radical Ventures, Omers Ventures, BDC, AI luminaries Geoffrey Hinton, Fei-Fei Li, Pieter Abbeel, Sanja Fidler, and others.

Elena Donio has been Chief Executive Officer of Axiom Global, Inc. since November 2016. Prior to this role, Donio served as President of Concur Technologies, Inc., from 2014 to 2016. She has also served as a Senior Manager at Deloitte & Touche and as a Senior Consultant at Andersen Consulting (Accenture). She holds BA in Economics from University of California, San Diego. Axiom is the global leading alternative legal services provider.